Israeli War on Lebanese Civilians Continues
A top United Nations humanitarian official, Jan Egeland, said he was shocked on inspecting southern Lebanon to find it littered with deadly unexploded cluster bombs. These were for the most part dropped in the last three days of the conflict, when it was foreseen that there would be a resolution and a ceasefire. He said, “What’s shocking and I would say, to me, completely immoral is that 90 percent of the cluster bomb strikes occurred in the last 72 hours of the conflict, when we knew there would be a resolution."
Egeland was not just harshly condemning a UN member state, which is a breach of protocol. He was also accusing Israel of crimes against humanity. You see, if a rationale could be found at all for using cluster bombs, it would be against a massed, invading enemy infantry corps. But just to scatter them all around a civilian area as a cease fire is imminent is not a legitimate military action. It is a monstrous crime. It is a surefire death sentence on hundreds, perhaps thousands of innocent children, who will find the bomblets and think they are playthings. The government of Ehud Olmert committed this crime as part of its cynical attempt to ethnically cleanse the far south of Lebanon of its Shiite inhabitants. It was a way of discouraging them from returning, just as was the massive demolition of thousands of houses, with bulldozers and aerial bombing, which had no military value whatsoever.
The American people are complicit in these war crimes, insofar as they provided the cluster bombs and supported Olmert to the hilt in his dirty war, which was only occasionally about actually combating Hizbullah fighters (there weren't any, in a lot of the places that were bombed).
Israel continued its across the board blockade of Lebanese ports, which is depriving dialysis patients of needed medicines and continuing to harm the entire Lebanese economy. 40% of the Lebanese electorate is Christian, and they are suffering along with everyone else. Lebanese unemployment is surging to Depression-era levels.
posted by Juan Cole @ 8/31/2006 12:29:00 AM
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2 Comments:
You are so right, Prof. Cole, but we can't touch the racist SOBs because they are awash in Congressional money and fear no one. No doubt they recycle it back to Washington to corrupt our Congress. A terrible vicious cycle that'll take a revolution to break.
What I don't understand is the Israeli publics pacifism on this issue. I read Haaretz and know they cannot be uninformed about these issues. They just simply do not value others lives. To me, it makes them no different than the Germans who remained silent about Hitler's death camps. The goals of the tactics are so obvious. And, in my community of Palestinian Christains, the genocide is nearly complete. Most of us live in diaspora. We do not have the protection of the Jews and the Muslims in having a different religion to insulate the community from intermarriage and integration.
Slowly, these tactics take away the people who they can negotiate peace with, making their claims to want this totally unbelievable to the Arab world. How can anyone belive this?
Many of those I knew in Palestine that were hoping to find peace before al-Aqsa have left or are leaving. You document much of this flight well, as it now is happening in Lebannon and in our occupation of Iraq. And, the conditions they impose in these nations only build barriers for us in diaspora.
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